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Home price info a phone call away

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Times Staff Writer

Attention all real estate hounds and home voyeurs. Your cellphone can now answer that all-important question: What did it sell for?

The cellphone must be armed with a global positioning system -- standard on most new phones -- and the data service Smarter Agent will beam the property price, size and date-of-sale information straight to your curious eyes.

Smarter Agent has teamed up with Sprint, which offers the “Recently Sold” service exclusively for now.

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It’s pretty simple to use. The phone will show you all sales made in your GPS vicinity in roughly the last two years. The data comes from public records, and most deeds take about three months to record after sale.

Another feature allows you to type in any U.S. address and get information about area sales including square footage, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, lot size and tax information. It also maps the homes’ locations.

By the end of the year, other phone service providers will probably offer the feature, and its developers have plans to expand the data to include available rentals and, eventually, data from Multiple Listing Services. The developers say they have data for 180 of the 200 major metropolitan areas, which includes all of Southern California.

Sprint charges $10 a month for its GPS data portal -- Internet access, e-mail and photos -- plus $4.99 for Smarter Agent.

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